Learning Java, 4th Edition

Building WAR Files with Ant

Thus far in this book, we have not become too preoccupied with special tools to help you construct Java applications. Partly, this is because it’s outside the scope of this text, and partly it reflects a small bias of the authors against getting too entangled with particular development environments. There is, however, one universal tool that should be in the arsenal of every Java developer: the Jakarta Project’s Ant. Ant is a project builder for Java, a pure Java application that fills the role that make does for C applications. Ant has many advantages over make when building Java code, not the least of which is that it comes with a wealth of special “targets” (declarative commands) to perform common Java-related operations such as building WAR files. Ant is fast, portable, and easy to install and use. Make it your friend.

We won’t cover the usage of Ant in detail here. You can learn more and download it from its home page. To get you started, we give you a sample build file here. The Ant build file supplied with the examples for this chapter will compile the source and build the completed WAR file for you. You can find it with the example source.

A Development-Oriented Directory Layout

At the beginning of this chapter, we described the layout of a WAR, including the standard files and directories that must appear inside the archive. While this file organization is necessary for deployment inside the archive, it may not be the best way to organize your ...